Interesting premise...do years and years of first lady duties kind of warp a person?

[dkf]

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/opinion/25brooks.html?em&ex=1206590400&en=6b390342506e7ca3&ei=5087

[Maddy McCall]

1. This the same David Brooks that pounded the war drums prior to the invasion?

The William F. Buckley protege David Brooks?

I can understand why you didn't attribute the article to the author. That would have been embarassing.

[dkf]

2. Hey, an interesting thought is an interesting thought.

I for one would greatly dislike having to go through that day in and day out for years and years and years. Hillary is counting 35 years of experience. How many of those years was she having to do first lady duties?

Ugh. I almost feel bad for her.

On edit: I think this is what makes me an Obama supporter...I can read something done by a Republican and recognize there may be a grain of truth in what they have to say. You reject it outright because it comes from the other side. I notice this a lot on this board, the rejection of ideas simply because they come from the other guy. I don't think that helps solve anything, but of course you are entitled to your process of screening out ideas and information.

[flor de jasmim]

3. Still, the fact that Hillary said of the young girl in Bosnia...

that she "took her stuff" -- how disrespectful is THAT!? That was an event the girl will probably remember forever, yet for Hillary it was just another stop. Understandable as an internal reaction, but appalling as an unofficial ambassador-of-good-will of the U.S.

[Hepburn]

4. Or it might be that....

...Hillary is naturally an insincere, phony, cold-hearted bitch and being First Lady all those years just made those natural personality traits more ingrained?

[flor de jasmim]

5. That's also possible. And there's the way she speaks of the 80 countries...

as if she had earned the Girl Scout travel badge. It's not the number of countries that she has seen that will make her a better or a worse President. I sometimes feel she is working her way through a checklist to try to prove her worth.

[dkf]

10. Brezinski says his travel agent has been to more countries than

Hillary and that doesn't make him/her better able to manage the Presidency.

He is a great advocate for Obama.

[Medusa]

6. Ding Ding Ding Ding! We have a winner!

Once again Hepburn got it right!

[Hepburn]

7. Hey, thank you!

It is not often that I get things right....and I appreciate someone noticing when I do!

:hi:

[Dogmudgeon]

8. I guess that's "reaching across the aisle"

All of the sudden, long-time neo-Cons and Bush enablers have been re-defined as "thoughful conservatives" because they are useful to the Obama crusade. Brooks is one of the most two-faced of the lot, "praising" Clinton as a "fine senator", then writing dozens of gossip-filled columns about her. In his last one, he said that she was turining the election into a "knife fight".

This is a two-fer for the conservatives -- they get to run against a candidate they think they can easily demonize from the ground up, and they get to destroy a long-time object of their hatred before she can develop a national base of electoral support. That well will stay poisoned for a long, long time. And we "progressives" have fallen for it, one of the most un-subtly Machiavellian ploys in the Atwater-Rove playbook.

We are indeed sowing the wind.

--p!

[dkf]

9. I just want to understand her because I don't get her at all.